The Game Master On Then And Now

Hudson is what you might call "the lost first
party." Long known as a third party developer and publisher of games
ranging from Mario Party to the Bomberman series, the company, originally
founded in the '70s, was also the shepherd of its own platform: the PC Engine,
or TurboGrafx-16, manufactured and sold in partnership with NEC Home Electronics.

That doesn't matter much these days, except to retro game fans, but it
does give the people who have been at the company for a long time -- like
Toshiyuki Takahashi, affectionately known as "Takahashi-Meijin," or
Game Master Takahashi -- a certain perspective.

Takahashi was catapulted to celebrity in Japan in the 1980s, becoming a role model to Famicom (NES)
obsessed Japanese kids thanks to his game playing skills. His celebrity may
have faded, but he continues to work at Hudson in its publicity department, and offers a 20-plus
year understanding of the market.

Here, he's interviewed alongside Kazufumi Shimizu, director of Hudson's upcoming Wii horror game Calling, about the state of the market in Japan and the U.S., where Hudson has found notable success with its downloadable Bomberman Live for the Xbox 360.

Thanks
to that, the company will soon follow up with the first new Bonk's Adventure game
in years -- an XBLA and PlayStation Network title.

With Gamasutra's fixation on history, of course, we couldn't resist
asking Takahashi about the PC Engine, in particular about the origins of its
CD-ROM2 System, one of the first CD-ROM gaming systems to launch in
the world (and the first to hit the U.S., in 1989.)

Today's Hudson

Brandon Sheffield: This might be a rude
question -- in the past, Hudson had a
habit of taking any game genre and making its own, better version of it. For
example, Nectaris was based on Famicom Wars, and Neutopia was based on Zelda.
Hudson applied more polish to them, though, and more "heart" to them.
You are a different sort of Hudson now.

Toshiyuki Takahashi: Well, up until around 2000 or 2001, we retained
that same philosophy of leaving it to the programmers, letting them create
whatever they wanted to create. But from the perspective of the company, not
all of the results were entirely successful. Sales continued to go down as a
result, and we accrued more and more debt.

In 2001 Konami bought a bunch of our stock and became more-or-less our
parent company. Since then, we've been trying more to ensure that each of our
individual releases are more profitable. So you could say that the current
climate makes it hard for programmers to simply create whatever they want to
any longer.

BS: That kind of mandate tends to
create more generic games rather than the more forward-moving games.

TT: Yeah, and I suppose a year or two ago -- maybe three -- we realized
this wasn't the best approach. That doesn't mean we went back to the old ways,
but with each game, we tried to listen to gamers' opinions more via playtests
and so on; we treated each project with more care than we used to.

That's how we're doing it now, so the direction has shifted a bit. With
the Hudson up to now, something like Calling never would've happened. Our business was in cutesy games
with multiplayer support, so we could never have made this.

Hudson's never made
this sort of haunted house-style game before, but now we have people like [director
Kazufumi] Shimizu here coming up with ideas like this, and now we have the company
telling them go ahead with it. That's what the past two or three years have
been like here. We're seeing the initial results right now, but I'm really
looking forward to what we'll have next year and the year after that, things
we've never done before.

BS: If the programmers are working on
what they want to make, the results will probably be more fun to play. You
actually care about it as a developer.

TT: Our company system changed again this year -- boy, it's changed a
lot of times! We're trying to implement a producer-driven system now. A single
producer now takes the responsibility for taking a game project and putting it
under his wing, so to speak, figuring out how to advertise it and so forth.

The process used to be separate, but now someone is on the team's side,
showing off what's good and fresh about the project, and it helps the staff
mesh better as a team. That's the system that started this year, and I'm
looking forward to seeing the results of that next year.

BS: A real director-style system.

TT: Right. Shimizu's a programmer, and until now, his job would've been
done after the program was complete. He'd think up the design for the manual
and so on, but someone else designed the webpage, for example. Now it's
different; he's the one who figures out what the Calling homepage should be like. The people who know the most about
the project are now the ones directing its public image.

Christian Nutt: I'm curious about Calling -- there's been discussion about
whether the Wii audience can support more mature games. What do you think about
that issue?

Kazufumi Shimizu: Well, when we started developing Calling, it was with the knowledge that the Wii marketplace might
be a tough one to crack for it. However, when it comes to the controls and the experience,
the Wii is really the platform that's best suited for it. The Wii has a pretty
family-friendly image, of course, and everyone knew from the start that it'd be
tough for this game in the marketplace. But we wanted it on the Wii; we wanted
to take [the remote] and use it like a phone.

Calling

From a pure developer standpoint, though, no one can say whether
something will sell or not at the outset -- and like what Takahashi said
earlier, if you aren't passionate about the game you're making, then it's not
going to have a chance in the first place. You need that sort of force working
on it. If all you think about is money and finances, then you tend to put what
you want to do on the back burner.

I think the higher-ups understand this -- even though the Hudson of the past had a lot of failure, there were
definitely a lot of diamonds in the rough, too. Besides, it all comes down to
the game. If the game is interesting, then it'll attract both kids and adults
on the Wii. It's hard for the Wii at present, but no matter what the platform,
if it's good, people will come to it.

BS: With a small staff, it sort of
becomes a battle between your ideas and the budget.

KS: Certainly. We're all designers here to some extent and we all have
ideas on what we want to do, but naturally we can't run through all of them.
But we had an environment where people felt discouraged to be creative and
discuss what they really wanted to make, and I think that's what we're really
improving upon here, right now and into the future.

BS: A new Bonk is being developed in the US. How did
that come about, and why hasn't Hudson supported
the series in Japan as much?

TT: Well, it's not that we haven't supported it so much as...That's more
of a question for Mike [from the U.S. office]. But the U.S. staff just absolutely loves Bonk. They begged to get a new one out! And we figured that since Bomberman Live was a pretty decent
success, selling something like half a million units, we figured that if they
love the idea that much, we could rely on them to produce something really fun.
So that's why they're making it.